I am at the BERA 2016 conference this week. For an unapologetic empiricist, its a bit of an odd place to be.

Yesterday I attended a small seminar at the conference, convened by BERA’s Practitioner Research Special Interest Group (SIG). There has been a lot of talk recently about the challenges faced in helping teachers to engage with research. A combination of lack of support from senior management, unhelpful writing styles, limited access to journal articles, and perfunctory or non-existent research methods courses in initial teacher education means that teachers tend not to engage fully with the research that is there to help inform what they do. This is in contrast to other, comparable, professions. For example, as a part of the everyday responsibility of being a nurse or a doctor there is the expectation that one will not only keep up to date with relevant research but be actively involved…